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On Fri, 21 Feb 2003 10:33:12 GMT, mca### [at] aol com (S McAvoy) wrote:
> Knowing how helpful you are I assume that you meant "how can the documentation
> be improved to help you find what you want to know".
Yes and no. While working on softwear professionally I'm interested in making
apps as much user-friendly as possible because it makes my profits. In various
projects I'm also responsible for making/updating documentation and I have
direct access to users so I always listen all notes. Relating to POV-World I'm
working on MegaPOV and I know how much there is to improve - for example next
MegaPOV will probably have context help for MegaPOV related keywords (have to
solve some problem there).
In general working with computers requires some assumptions about user. If he is
looking for string related function I expect he will read "String functions"
chapter because logical connection between searched keyword and name of chapter
is obvious. Please note either "function" and "string" keywords appear in
subject of original post so you can't say he has language problems in that area.
I understand user can not know all names of chapters. But then simple search any
combination of "string", "function", "functions", "length" should lead to
something like: http://www.povray.org/search/?s=string+length+function where
either "String functions" and "Float functions" are at top. If he do not tried
search nor read table of content then whatever will be written in documentation
he will never find it. Moreover he used "strlen" keyword which appear in index
of documentation.
My elaborated answer is not offence against original poster because I understand
that's what new users usually do - never start from manual. My answer is against
wrong conclusions mentioned later. Documentation has probably holes but none
documentation hole caused that user to be asking for string length function.
ABX
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